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bikerguy99 writes "Robert X. Cringely, who had a good nose for the Mac mini from the very beginning, has published another bit of his thoughts on PBS. This time he speculates that Mac mini is all about movies - his thoughts on the subject are quite logical and provide intriguing insights into Apple's interest in producing a cheap headless Mac in the first place."

of normal joe's that is. for others it's a good start for a small computer if you either want it to be a mac or don't care about the os(but it's just a start still, if you just want to view movies on the tv you're better off buying a stand alone player or heck, even xbox.. and most people won't ever edit movies).

That may not be how it's marketed, but why would they do that if such a store doesn't exist (yet)? If someone wanted to use the Mac mini as part of a home entertainment system, its size (and presumably low noise level, though I've never seen one in person) make it perfect for such an application.

Most of the time when it's in operation, the fan does not appear to run at all, meaning it's as silent as a laptop.

By way of comparison, the eMac has a big, slow-turning fan (about 4" wide) in order to ensure fairly quiet operation. It's quieter than some of the amps in my music studio... When the fan on the mini does engage, it's actually somehow quieter than the massive fan on the eMac.

The loudest component on the whole darn thing is the DVD drive, which is far from the loudest drive I've heard, but still about what you would expect from a slot-loading computer drive.

They pretty much had to make a product like this. You had mac cubes selling on ebay for four to five hundred dollars a piece. Obviously there was a pent up demand for a small, cheap mac with no monitor.
It's actually the ideal home server.

But why? I really don't understand the draw of the mac as a server. The things people claim macs are good about have to do with intuitive gui, clean gui, conducive to productivity. These are not really important for servers.

What makes you say so? Imagine a small home network. It's quite obvious that in a home network, a silent machine running 24/7 might come handy - to share the printer among all home users, to share the internet connection via Airport/WiFi, to share the common iTunes Music Library for all the home users, to serve as a firewall for home network, to serve Apache to the outside world etc. Why do we rarely see setup like this in non-geeky households? Because it requires geeky skills on both Windows and Linux. That's why you think that servers don't need to be easy to setup and configure - because non-geeks don't even TRY. But if you use Mac Mini, you can setup all the services described above with a few clicks on intuitive icons ("Enable Web Sharing", "Enable Firewall", "Share iTunes Music Library", "Share Printer" etc). Plus - it's silent, so you don't need "server room" in your household, Mac Mini can provide all these services, like, anywhere you want. And just connect a keyboard/monitor whenever you want to change some services or configurations.

Because there is far more to OS X than merely a pretty GUI. The entire underlying kernel is an excellent POSIX-compliant UNIX implementation, arguably better than Solaris. I've been using my PowerMac as a pseudo-media server for about a year now, and it's been rock solid and a pleasure to work with via ssh. With Linux I was frequently (sometimes constantly) having to fight with various installers, configuration management, etc. That is far less of an issue under OS X, and it has freed up my time to do other more intersting things.

Besides, even on a headless server you can access the GUI remotely. You want to see something strange, do a VNC connection to OS X via Solaris.:) There's something not quite right about seeing the dock inside of a Gnome window.

In case the sentence, "... he taught for several years at Stanford University..." leads anyone to believe that Cringely was on the Stanford faculty.

Cringely was a graduate student at Stanford, during which time, he TA'ed a few classes. He never finished graduate school. Since then he has claimed (and then retracted) that he had a Ph.D. and had been an Assistant Professor at Stanford. When confronted, with the truth, he first opined that he thought being a TA was the same as being an Assistant Professor, and then removed the Assistant Professor and Ph.D. bit from his official bio.

Caused more than a little stir in academic circles in 1998. Here's the
link [stanford.org] from the Stanford Daily online from 1998.

All they need to do is just listen to the rumour mills and create the product that gets the most fan fare....

Apple employee: They seem to want the mini to act like a video iPod
Jobs: But that's just stupid, the drive it's so tiny!
Apple employee: They think that once the movies are compressed for downloading in AVC that they'll be both high quality and small file size..
Jobs: Excellent, I'm a genius. We'll release in Spring, now sue think secret for springing the idea early, we don't want anyone copying our genius today.

It must be nice to be cringely. Just make a different totally random prediction every week, and you'll be hailed as a visionary because just by the law of averages at least some of your predictions will turn out to be true, sort of, eventually.

But one of the problems is a lack of HDTV tuner. You could get Elgato's EyeTV 500 [elgato.com] to make your Mini Mac into an HD PVR but you're still lacking 5.1 digital audio. I don't know what you could do about that. If you're spending the $$$ to get an HDTV then you probably already have, or would want to get a nice 5.1 or 7.1 sound system. You wouldn't want to be stuck with stereo from you Mini Mac.

I'm not sure Cringely's HD movie service would catch on either. It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure it would be very successful. One thing is certain though, a lot of people are going to have a lot of fun and do some cool stuff with their Mini Macs.

Another big problem is lack of a remote control. I guess you could get a USB solution but it seems like they would have built-in an infra-red port if they really wanted this to be part of a home theatre solution.

Salling Clicker rocks. I resisted buying this for a long time, but finally did. It's really amazing. I don't have a TV in my bedroom, so I just pop my Powerbook on the dresser and run iDVD from my cell phone, or my Clie. It rocks.

Maybe Tiger will include something similar. Most American households have a cell phone. Many (though still a minority) have Bluetooth. If this is a media center, imagine that you don't have to buy a remote control for it BECAUSE YOU ALREADY HAVE ONE in your cell phone. M

I was confused by that exclusion as well. But I really think they were just trying to make the box as cheaply as possible and realized most users would not need 5.1, so they could let it be a separate device.

You could get Elgato's EyeTV 500 to make your Mini Mac into an HD PVR but you're still lacking 5.1 digital audio.

As well as the CPU horsepower necessary to decode the video that the EyeTV recorded. If you read the system requirements on Elgato's website, the EyeTV 500 requires DUAL G5s to playback HDTV at full resolution. Single-processor G4 mini-macs, although nice computers for what they are, need not apply.

The playback software for Elgato takes no advantage of any hardware acceleration.

So, it may be possible to play back content with better accelerated players...

A friend has been forwarding me results of a test someone is doing with the EyeTV 500 and Powerbook 1.25GHz (roughly the same specs, probably a fair amount of memory). At first he was able to get just shoppy playback, but after some tweaking (forget what that was) was able to get stable playback, of at least a SDTV feed (not quite full HDTV). So t

Right, that's why I (and the Elgato webpage) said HDTV playback at full resolution. I never said it couldn't play regular TV.

I didn't say that you didn't say what I couldn't say... or something like that.:-)

What I was saying is that a Powerbook 1.25 can seemingly playback an 720P signal with no dropped frames. Unknown yet if a full HDTV signal would work, but it's very promising given that using the Elgato software the video for that same 720p is an unwatchable mess, and the higher end Mac mini is 1.42

"Elgato had these devices out long before the mini, I think they just stumbled into a really successful market if they play the cards right."

Since I don't know this first hand, take it with a grain or two of salt. I read a report from the expo that Elgato plans to shut down production of the EyeTV 500 some time this spring. This is due to the dung infested legacy of retiring FCC chairman Michael Powell and his infernal Broadcast Flag. Since there is no practical way to implement it in a computer device, Elgato faces the prospect of selling an illegal device when the BF regulation goes into effect this summer. Rather than fight that battle it seems that Elgato will simply discontinue selling its HDTV device.

So the practical advice seems to be that you need to buy them before the feds make it illegal to sell them. The EFF has brought a lawsuit challenging the authority of the FCC to regulate the design of computer devices but who knows how soon that will provide a result or if it will be a favorable result.

That's because today's video cards have all sorts of neat video acceleration features which for some reason, ElGato has chosen not to use. Perhaps Apple won't release a needed spec (as it would probably cause no end of trouble with Core Video/Quartz Extreme, etc.)
HDTV playback, IIRC, is well within the capabilities of a 800 MHz Pentium III. If Apple decides to embrace HDTV, the miniMac will be able to play it back..

Follow the link in my original post to the Elgato EyeTV 500 product page. It's a Firewire HDTV tuner that now works with HDTV over the air as well as over Cable. I've also heard that most and possibly all HDTV tuners or cable boxes have a Firewire port out. If that is the case then you can just plug it into your Mac's Firewire port and view and record the HDTV content. You can't change the channels through your Mac though.

This is one of Cringely's less-original flights of fancy, (lots of people have been suspecting that iTMS could expand to movies for some time now), but also one that seems to me to be very on-target.

My mini arrived at my office via FedEx on Thrusday, and I've been setting it up for exactly the same purpose as almost everybody else I've heard from who's buying one: It's going into the media room.

A $300 digital tuner called the EyeTV gives me PVR features, and a $60 USB break-out box gives me DTS sound for DVD's. (The G4 solution can't quite do 1080i in full-screen mode, but I only need 720p anyway...) The DVI port is compatible with the wide-screen projector I'm planning on buying next month. In spite of the relatively light-weight video card, it plays World of Warcraft nearly as well as my AMD Frankenstein box with a 256 MB GeForce card.

So this thing is already serving up movies, TV, music, and games, and will be just about the only media device in the room (I might consider moving the X-Box into whatever room my old TV goes to.)

However, like many geeks, I also sometimes watch downloaded materials. I'm not as big on bootleg DivX's as some folks, but the occasional anime "fan-sub" has found its way onto my HD, and there's also plenty of legit stuff out there, such as "Red vs. Blue."

If it was possible to click on a movie or classic TV show in the iTMS, and download it as an MPEG2 stream for a reasonable price, even if it took overnight to get it, I would probably snap it up.

I passed on the DVD burner option for the mini. I figure I can get a better & faster double-density burner sometime down the road as an external firewire option. If this movies-on-demand feature of iTMS actually comes to pass, I might find myself buying a burner sooner rather than later.

For there to be a true digital DVD library device, hard disk storage prices are going to have to come down to a fraction of what they are now. Time will provide this, but right now, it doesn't seem like the hardcore movie buffs -- who seem like the target market for something like a digital DVD library -- would be satisfied with the comparatively tiny amount of storage available in the 2.5" hard disk form factor. A Mini with an external terabyte of storage would be better, but that's going to more than double its price.

Maybe I'm just not getting it, but I really think Cringely missed the boat on this one.

So what you're saying is that your internet pipe is faster than your hard drive? Tell you what I'll go buy you a nice 15k scsi disk, you buy me a new internet connection, k?

On the other hand, if you assume Cringely is right and that it's for downloads AND that those downloads will be faster than going to the rental store, you're left with only a couple obvious things:

1) Streaming. You'd be buffering for the 15 minutes of going-to-store then play and rely on the buffer.

2) You'll need a big pipe. The rate of 3-10Mbps for a dvd video (dunno about HD video) isn't likely to go down too much more with other compression. On the other hand, with cable companies talking about upping their service to 4Mbps or 6Mbps, and baby bells trialing FTTP that's approaching feasibility.

I'd mark it as more a 2k6 thing than 2k5 but who knows maybe it'll take off as a driving force behind FTTP. I'm sure I could figure something to use my bandwidth there for since I'm not a huge movie watcher.

I dunno about you, but I'd like to keep these videos around longer than 48 hours. I don't "rent" songs on the iTMS, and I wouldn't want to be "renting" movies on the iMVS, either, unless it were a LOT cheaper.

Streaming is fine for the latter, but we already have infrastructure for this. It's called your pay-per-view channel, and it's available in HD. (It's too bad the Onion doesn't have old archives on-line any more, or I'd take this opportunity to link to their classic "Gateway Introduces $5000 Computer T

Sorry, the hard disk concerns are crap. The 4200 RPM drives Apple is using can sustain aroun 15 MB per second. In comparison, HDTV has a maximum data rate of 2.4MBps (19.2Mbps) and Blu-ray has a maximum data rate of 4.5MBps (36Mbps). The hard drives won't be a problem.

I've never had music skip on my iPod mini and the issue wouldn't be the speed of the hard drive, which on any iPod is at least 3MB per second (do you have any MP3s encoded at 3145728-bit? Mine generally max out at 320). Instead, it wou

I imagine that buying movies online you'd be able to buy more highly compressed versions using that new Pixlet [apple.com] (see sidebar in link) codec, just like you can buy compressed AAC files from the store instead of full uncomressed CDs. Here's what Apple has to say about Pixlet:

Pixlet is the first studio-grade codec for filmmakers. Pixlet provides 20-25:1 compression, allowing a 75MB/sec series of frames to be delivered in a 3MB/sec movie, similar to DV data rates. Or a series of frames that are over 6GB in si

Pixlet is not lossless. It's a high quality wavelet based lossy codec; sort of like JPEG2000, but with a bunch of optimisations for video.

What makes pixlet suitable for editing is that it has only I frames (i.e. each frame of the video is a complete entity in itself, not refrencing data in any other frame), thus it can be scrubbed quickly and accurately, and cut cleanly at any point (unlike the various MPEG1/2/4 and MPEG-4-derrived codecs, which decrease file size by refrencing informat

Recording HD is easy. Hook up the tuner (or the set top box) to the mac via firewire. The bits come in (HDTV is digital), they get written to the hard drive. An HDTV recorder requires very little horsepower, although playback requires either the able assistance of a modern video card (for motion compensation, iDCT calculations, etc) or a rather fast general purpose CPU.

HDTV encoding is done at the source. If you have an HDTV tuner then what you get is the raw MPEG-2 stream that the station sends -- no need to encode. The camcorders do their own encoding right before they write down the stream, otherwise there would just be no space.

So you do not need a faster processor, just a bus and HD fast enough to get the stream. Playback of HDTV on the other hand may take some juice, but should be easily handled by most modern processors including the mini.

Slight correction -- it requires at least a 2.4GHz-equivalent machine. You're right that the mini-mac can't do it, but a 1.8GHz G5 iMac just might (I haven't tried it though, so then again it might not).

Seriously, staring that the MHz is completely pointless. You simply can't compare different CPU-families based on their clock-speed. P4 clocks alot higher than Athlon64 does, yet Athlon 64 mops the floor with the P4. How can that be? Or do you suggest that 2.4GHz Celeron is faster than my 2.2GHz Athlon64?

I wonder if you know that MHz means jack shit, especially when comparing across architectures as different as x86 and PowerPC. How can you hang out around Slashdot and not know about the megahertz myth [hardwareanalysis.com]? It's practically gospel. It also happens to be true.

However, I agree that the Mac mini would find it difficult to encode HD video in anything approaching realtime, not least because of its 4200 RPM laptop hard drive.

This comment seems unnecessary and strangely placed. FTA:Here's my thinking, and it is just thinking -- I have no insider knowledge of Apple's plans, I haven't been diving in any Cupertino dumpsters, and nobody who knows the truth has told me a darned thing.I've got to wonder if it was even mentioned because of the whole Think Secret lawsuit. Are people who are spouting idle rumors and speculation going to feel the pressure to issue out-of-the-blue disclaimers? Sigh. The overly litigious benchmark h

First, an average movie would be about 1-2 GB if compressed really well. An average broadband user has probably 100-200 kBps download speed on average. This amounts to 3 hours of downloading per movie, at least. Non-geeks probably will be displeased.

Second, the movies have to be purchased ($10 per download, for example) and stored on the HDD. The HDD is either 40 or 80 GB, making it capable of storing anywhere from 20 to 60 movies. What the customer should do after the disk is full?

There are solutions to both problems, though. The bandwidth can be spread between users using BitTorrent, and the customer can be allowed to re-download the same movie at a later time, as long as he presents the same key to the web store.

But for an average user a DVD player and a DVD store and/or rental place work just as well, and with much less hassle. iTunes works because it is easy. But downloading of a movie is anything but easy, at least so far.

Possibly, though, Apple looks far ahead. But if they just wanted to set up a video distribution business they could have released some iFlicks software for Windows, this results in an instantaneous user base, no need to wait for anything built or sold, and they can have the video store running within days.

it was interesting to see a representative from Sony with Steve Jobs at Mac World. the two companies have cooperated together in the past (the first powerbook, i think) this makes more sense as both companies seem to converge towards the same goal. that is, domination of home electronics.

now if the next Mac Mini comes with a Cell Processor, you can easly distribute alot of High Definition stuff. Mac Mini Cells, that your PS3 can play with

The processing power for playing back those touted AVC H.264 movies should be borderline on the Mac Mini as this advanced media format is quite processor intensive. MPEG/ITU-T marketing papers have indicated that AVC/H.264 roughly takes 4x the decoding power for real time playback as MPEG-2 and AVC/H.264 offers the same quality at half the bitrate as MPEG-2. Using new builds of mplayer that support AVC/H.264 playback take up 70% of my G5's processor time at 420p, although other implementations take up less

I've always heard that online movies are compressed down to pretty low quality. How big would a two hour full HD movie be? Lots bigger than your typical DivX I bet. Your typical home broadband system would be hard put to download it in less than a day.

They were messing around with some open codec at one of the keynotes (I think it was the one where they first showed Tiger). Looked like it would be cool for streaming. Same quality as divx at half the size? Something like that?

I find it amusing that pretty much everyone is trying to push functionality onto the Mac mini.

Now I'm as guilty as the rest, but has anyone stopped to consider that the mini is just a low-cost, small-footprint Mac aimed at potential switchers?

I suspect that deep down, we know that's all the mini is, but we're just trying to find some kind of rationalization for buying one. (I'll admit it: I've been wanting to get one to act as a dedicated server for my iTunes Library, a function I think it'd perform quite well.)

I think it is aimed at exactly the sort of people who claim to know what it is for. It's a computer, so of course there are a bunch of things it could be used for, and the small form-factor gives you the all of the usual non-desktop options that SFF systems are used in. All of these people who are saying "it's for $foo" are really just projecting their own ideas, and will likely go out and buy one and use it for $foo. Those who are saying "oh wait, it can't actually be used for $foo, because it lacks $bar" will probably go out and buy one anyway, and buy the add-on required for $bar.

The "it's for $foo" people must be working out great for Apple, as free advertising. All of the pundits out there (including Cringely) are collectively declaring more uses for the Mac Mini than Apple's marketing department could ever dream up, and spreading the word more widely than Apple's advertising budget could ever afford.

Besides, viewers will tolerate non-real-time movie downloads -- as long as they take less time than driving to Blockbuster and back

For most people living in urban areas, video stores are all over the place. It's no more than a 15 minute trip the nearest Blockbuster, and I could walk down the street to the local place quicker than that. Even at a generously small estimate of a 1G download for a full length, full res HDTV over the average 1.5mb line is about an hour and a half. It's

The where is the remote control? I know you can buy stuff aftermarket, but any serious media center would require a remote control like 99.99% of the rest of the serious market.

Take it for what it is, Apple is trying to take a stab back into the heart of the PC market with cheap and reliable machine for the masses. Is it a mystery to Mac fans why large institutions started dumping them in the 90's?

It's about the money, plain and simple. I bought my Powerbook because it was relatively inexpensive and extre

1. both models of the mac mini are currently shipping without support for either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. Cringely glosses over this stating that the mini will exclusively be for delivering online HD content.

2. there is no IR/remote support on the mac mini, so no remote control. this is kind of a big and small deal at the same time. it would not have cost much for them to add support for this, yet it is a feature essential to media centers.

3. the current mac mini models are simply not powerful enough to decode HD video compressed with modern MPEG-4, WMA9-level codecs.

4. no component video out on the mini. Cringely once again glosses over this, stating that DVI is sufficient. while DVI does seem to generally work on DVI/HDMI and DVI/HDCP televisions, there are cases where it does not, and it is certainly not officially supported by most vendors. remember this is Apple, they're not going to push technologies that aren't officially supported. there is no evidence of HDMI/HDCP support on the mac mini.

A lot of these could be fixed in the future, with an "upgraded" mac mini. but i just don't think it adds up. the mini doesn't even look like a home theater component. Cringely seems to be basing his entire theory on the Quicktime trailers site being down for an evening... to me this is not even close to being a sufficient foundation to support his claims.

I do hope one day Apple releases a media center solution. They are one company who could really shake things up and bring some attention to the media center concept, which I am totally into after installing Xbox Media Center (http://www.xboxmediacenter.com) on my modded Xbox. I just don't see this happening anytime soon, and in particular not with the mac mini. I sure hope I'm wrong!

1) I think it's premature to call out lack of support for blu-ray when there are hardly any players anywhere yet! I think Apple did announce support in Tiger. Already the Superdrive is BTO, probably a blu-ray drive could be added later as needed and become another BTO option.

2) There is IR support, Keyspan USB remote which is an IR remote with a USB/IR receiver. Works by default with iTunes and the movie player. Is linked to from Mac mini Accessories page in Apple store.

3) Check out the specs for Pixlet [apple.com] which lets you play back "movie quality frames" on a 1GHz G4. But really the video card in the mini is powerful enough to do the job for HDTV, you just need players than make use of it.

4) Could use S-Video, though most real video people would cringe. I agree that is the major stickling point, I am OK as I have a projector but I have also heard of problems connecting computers to HDTV sets with DVi inputs. Perhaps Tiger will help in this regard.

I think it's very usable now, but I tend to agree they may well release an updated version later with a little more bundling (like 5.1 built in instead of requiring a seperate adaptor).

Sorry I didn't include more links to things but I've already done a bunch of responses, check those for more links.

3) Check out the specs for Pixlet which lets you play back "movie quality frames" on a 1GHz G4.

Pixlet is a very high-bitrate codec that content creators are supposed to use to preview their video. According to Apple's H.264 FAQ [apple.com], a 1GHz G4 is needed to play "high-end digital film frames at 960x540 (at about 20 Mbps)." For those not used to doing the math, that's about 18GB for a 2-hour movie. An HD 1080p movie is twice as large and requires a dual 2.0GHz G5, but this doesn't matter because Pixlet is for content creation, not distributing HD video. H.264 is the codec for distributing HD video and will be included in Quicktime 7.

But really the video card in the mini is powerful enough to do the job for HDTV, you just need players than make use of it.

I'd sure like to know the real system requirements (CPU and/or GPU) to play back H.264 video at 1280x720 and 1920x1080. I can't find them at Apple's site or with Google.

Here's the Pixlet info from the FAQ:

How does H.264 compare with Pixlet?

H.264 and Pixlet are designed for different uses.

Pixlet is focused on workflow, designed for digital filmmakers, animators and effects artists to easily review high-resolution image sequences on a standard PowerMac or PowerBook. Pixlet plays every frame of a sequence without frame-to-frame dependencies so that a media professional can scrutinize every detail of a sequence. Pixlet enables high-end digital film frames at 960x540 (at about 20 Mbps) to play in real time with a 1GHz G4 or faster Macintosh, while 1920x1080 frames (at about 40 Mbps) will play in real time on a dual 2GHz G5 or faster. This capability eliminates the need to invest in costly, proprietary hardware for the professional review process.

H.264 is a delivery codec, optimized for high quality and efficiency. It leverages data that does not change between frames for more efficient compression. While Pixlet may require about 40 Mbps for 1920x1080 content, H.264 delivers 1920x1080 content at about 8 Mbps. This efficiency in H.264 enables delivery to and playback on a wide range of devices, from mobile phones to computers to HDTV and beyond.

Lets have a look on the
accessories page [apple.com].
1) well, are there any actual disks shipping yet? Besides, I don't see DVD's dying anytime soon.
2) remote, yep there it is.
3) probably not, but I'd love to see a mac mini running a mythtv front end, with a big file server hiding somewhere else out of earshot.
4) component video, yep there it is.
And you can even get 5.1 or DTS to your receiver.

I generally agree that Apple isn't going to be targeting the Mac mini at home video playback for the masses (at least not anytime soon), but I do have to correct a few things in your post none-the-less:

2. there is no IR/remote support on the mac mini, so no remote control. this is kind of a big and small deal at the same time. it would not have cost much for them to add support for this, yet it is a feature essential to media centers.

This is a simple question, but since I am completely Apple-illiterate I'd like to know for sure. Can I plug a nice USB audio card on the mini? Will it work? An Audigy NX would be a nice choice for games, a firewire m-audio would be nice for recording. Generally speaking, do PC USB peripherals work with apple computers or do I need "special" expensive Mac versions?

AMD64 is an architecture, dipshit. Also known as "x86_64" and called "EMT64" or "ia-32e" by Intel.

AMD *invented* it, and AMD64 just happens to be the name I and a few others such as Linus like to use. It has nothing to do with brand loyalty.

I use Gentoo on three AMD64 machines (a server and desktop at home, and a workstation at my job) and the price/performance value is truly wonderful.Apple can't hold a candle to it; the only good thing they've got going for them is their OSX software. If they ported

Excuse me but most people use PCs to do the following:1. Browse on http2. email, but many find MUAs too difficult (POP server config: witchcraft!) and stick to webmail.3. Type crap on Word.4. Occasionally tinker with cretinous software bundled with the new crackpipe-inkjet priner.5. Indulge in CD/DVD duplication.6. Games, but apart from computer literates & fanatics most don't care or prefer simple consoles.

All these activities have OsX equivalent programs that do the job with excellent quality. Not ev

Excuse me, but do you honestly believe one should take into account the "day to day running of a computer" when discussing the relative merits of processor architectures?

I'm going to go way the fuck out on a limb here and say "yes." I'm going to say "yes," that verbally masturbating over the number of dizmos on the wizzle bus is mind-bogglingly stupid when the fundamental differences -- like what software runs on each --so galactically outweigh the kinds of angel-counting in which you're engaged.

Name one such part costing around $150, and show me where I can buy one of them along with a compatible motherboard that has SATA and FW800."

Dude, you can get a Gamecube for $99, and it's already got the PowerPC in. LOL!It's not about what YOU as an individual can buy processors for, it's what they cost manufacturers who make computers and electronics. And they can certainly get more bang for the buck with PPC, which is wh

Your rock of choice is this thing you mentioned called "AMD64." (No idea what that is. Never heard of it. I'm taking your word for it that it's a real thing.)

Never heard of AMD64? He's talking about the AMD chips (Athlon and Opteron) that are 100% compatible with x86 (think "Pentium") but are faster in just about every regard, no more expensive (sometimes cheaper), and also happen to run 64-bit code if you have any (think: more than 4 GB of RAM).

I'm sorry, but being excited about AMD64 is not a leet fanboy thing. They really are awesome processors, and they're beating the socks off of anything from Intel these days for the vast majority of high-end computing users.

From what I've read, as a cpu, the AMD64 is certainly in the same performance class as a G5 (and vice versa).

However, the mini-Mac is not a cpu, and doesn't use a G5. But from recent testing [macintouch.com], it's close enuf for mundane purposes.

The weakest links I see are the notebook hard drive (I'm guessing the Cube fiasco prevented them (politically) from a slightly different form factor with a "real" HD), and they could have spent the extra buck and added a second Firewire port.

You do realize that the AMD64 arch. is the direct competition to the G5, right?

Of course it's not. You can't run software compiled for the G5 on this "AMD64" blah-blah whatever, nor can you drop an AMD64 whoozit into place behind an Apple system controller. Saying the two compete is like saying that PAL competes with NTSC. The two things never intersect.

Despite what Jobs about the G5 being the first 64-Bit workstation on the market

He never said that. This is rapidly becoming an "Al Gore invented the I

By the way: This comes from a former Linux user who had Debian installed exclusively on my iBook 2.2 (arguably best Linux-supported PPC laptop) for more than 18 month until finally I gave up and dumped Linux for Mac OS X. Never looked back.

Ummm, you shouldn't? He didn't cite incompatibility for Linux, so he must mean hardware, not software.

Correct, except for the fact that that "tinkering" with Linux involves getting software that should work to actually work. Naturally, this is distinct from software being 100% incompatible to begin with (i.e. win32 apps that won't run on their Linux or OSX)

- The Shuttle would propably be noisier- It would consume more space- It doesn't look as good (matter of taste though)- You can't run OS X on it- With similar specs it would propably cost the same or more than the Mini

But if it REALLY must be mini, you can probably find a suitable mini-itx system somewhere. Just google for it.

I suspect a lot of peoople who are recommending PC alternatives aren't paying for the OS or the S/W, if you DIY a system you pay way over the odds for these compared to what a reseller adds to a bundled price (eg Dell).

Then there is support, do you want to do this or would you like help with it.

Ease of use. If you want a Nix then the Mac is something you can use and the wife. Can't say that of many.

"What real computers are currently on the market to compete with this? When my wife asks for the "cute little MAC", what PC can I buy instead?"

Out of curiosity, why wouldn't a Mac mini be a 'real computer'? If your wife (a 'real' computer user...?) can do what she wants on it, what's not 'real' about it? I mean, if she wants to play a bunch of games.. well okay. But.. is she a programmer? 3D artist maybe? What is a 'real computer'? Is it something where the keyboard only has a 1 and a 0?

"When my wife asks for the "cute little MAC", what PC can I buy instead?"

You're not planning to stay married for very long, are you? I know when my wife asks for something specific, it's generally not a good idea to go against her wishes and arrogantly substitute some other item.

You're talking about a completely different architecture.I have a I have a 800mhz G4 with 1gb ram and the same video card.It plays all file formats at full screen quite happily while doing a bunch of things in the background. A mplayer playing a mpg stretched to full screen is only 25% cpu usage. An Avi about 30%, A WMV is about 35%. The worst seems to be a real player (.rm) video which can be up to 45%-50% (but how many of them would you play).

With dedicated hardware like the pvr-350 card from hauppauge the CPU issue goes away. What I would forsee would be an external device like the Plextor ConvertX PVR PX-TV402U but with decoding as well as encoding. Perhaps it could attach to the side of the unit forming something that is about the size of a vcr. It would connect to the mac via firewire in the back so the front would look sleek, or it could be built into a next generation mini mac.

Of course, all these downloaded movies will only play on one computer, require a connection to the internet each time you want to play the movie (to authenticate), and you will only "own" the movie for 48 hours.

Actually, I think it's quite a good idea. I would love to see Farscape and Firefly in HD if possible. I've been using Netflix to catch up on all the cool sci-fi I've missed over the last decade (I don't watch broadcast anything - only DVDs) and I've thoroughly enjoyed the lack of commercials.

I was thinking the same thing in terms of MythTV. The problem is that it will not have a chance to work as a backend -- not enough power and the lack of drivers to drive external tuners will be killer.

However, it can serve as a nice front end, assuming that good video drivers exist. Unfortunately that is a big if.

Unfortunately, it seems that this box will not be a good MythBox for now, and interestingly enough...it seems that this will be something along the lines of a Mac-Box which will probably be more

Basically, the Mac mini is as fast as or faster than every consumer Mac except the iMac G5, and the iMac G5 only wins on a few specific tasks. For the money, there's no question but what the mini is the fastest Mac there is.